Ethiopia 2024 Mission Update #4 (Final)

We’re back! Our mission team has returned to the United States, and we are equal parts excited to be back and sad to not be in Ethiopia anymore. This year's trip was a blast, filled with service, love, growth, and above all- God’s presence and provision. 

Monday morning we resumed helping out with the children’s program Melese was leading and playing games with a whole bunch of kids. It was exciting to see all the kids again after the weekend, and they started seeking us out to sit by them during lessons and play games with them during the break times. Monday afternoon we returned to Victory Gate and began the work of filling 200 bags with 15 kgs of teff, a grain originating in Ethiopia and a staple food eaten every day there. These bags filled with teff supply families in the Korah landfill area with food for a month. It was a lot of fun developing a system for filling the bags and then weighing them and adding or subtracting grain to hit the 15 kgs exactly.

Tuesday began the same as Monday with the children’s program in the morning, discussing Jesus calming the storm, and Jesus healing a man with leprosy. Choosing to focus on Jesus healing a man with leprosy was a great choice in lessons because there is a large leprosy clinic in the Korah region, so these kids have seen people with leprosy on a weekly, if not daily, basis. In the evening we worked with Endale at Victory Gate handing out the bags of teff we filled the day before. It rained pretty hard that afternoon, so we did not end up passing out all the bags, but we handed out a good portion. We then went to an Indian restaurant in Addis and had lots of delicious foods, the best one being the chicken popsicles.

Wednesday morning started out the same as Tuesday morning with the children’s program, but after we ate lunch, our team went to Sabahar, a premium Ethiopian textile shop that employs women from the Korah region. They train the women to create different beautiful textiles such as blankets, beach towels, napkins, and much more, and they pay the women liveable wages. There we bought many of the things listed above and more, and some of you that read this will receive some of those as gifts. We spent the afternoon at Victory Gate handing out even more bags of teff, as well as bags of charcoal, soap, and milk.  

Thursday was an especially eventful day for our team. We went to Hope for Korah, a non-profit just a block from the compound where we were staying, and we helped out with the program until lunch. At Hope for Korah they train and employ women from the Korah area that make baskets, and also have programs for children. They are looking forward to further expanding their mission. While there we were blessed to meet Mrs. Eve, who actually founded Hope for Korah, and her husband David. That afternoon we went to Victory Gate and split up into smaller groups. We each took some tarps, teff, and charcoal, and then went and visited people in their homes next to the Korah landfill. This was a very eye opening experience, and it made the struggles we had only heard about vivid, yet incomprehensible. Most of these visits consisted of single women whose husbands had left them and their children and who had difficulty finding employment. On top of that many of them are HIV+, and it further inhibits their ability to provide for themselves and their children, which leads to many of them being ostracized. It was a blessing that we were able to meet our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, visit them in their homes, and learn about them and their lives. It was made more impactful knowing that they don’t often have visitors or people that go out of their way for them.  At the same time it was heartbreaking, and the only thing we could offer other than our presence was prayer for them and their families, and that God’s hands would be upon them. It really sank in that the only thing we could turn to was prayer, and these people experience what it means to live on faith in circumstances where it would be imaginable to not have it at all. We hope to have many opportunities to share what we saw and experienced in Korah.

Friday morning Melese took us to a large open air market in Ethiopia called Merkato, where there are more than 10,000 people employed. This was the largest market most of the people on the trip had ever witnessed. That afternoon we went to another non-profit in the Korah region called Adera Designs. At Adera Designs there is a daycare that has over 100 children from the Korah region enrolled, and their mothers are trained and employed to make jewelry and other items with paper and other materials. The daycare gives the mothers an opportunity to be able to work, and many of our team bought jewelry there. That evening we had an end of trip celebration at the Weeks family's house, and afterwards we went on a night drive to find hyenas. We all loaded up in a land cruiser and took off. An hour later, half of us were on top of the land cruiser holding flashlights and looking at hyenas. On the way back, we stopped at a place with traditional music and dancing.

Saturday was our last day in Ethiopia, and we spent the morning packing. Then we had a coffee ceremony with the mothers of the children who had been attending the program for the last week and a half. An Ethiopian woman who had been teaching during the children’s program led a discussion where she shared her experience of trying to raise Christian children in the area, talking about the difficulties and sharing some advice. After the coffee ceremony, we did some last minute shopping at the shops mentioned above, and then headed for dinner at Sishu to get our last Ethiopian burgers and some Ethiopian coffee from next door to bring home. After that we did evening prayer, loaded up, and headed for the airport. We flew out at 12:45 a.m. on Sunday morning, flew five-and-a-half hours to Istanbul, spent seven hours there and then boarded a twelve-and-a-half hour flight to Dallas, landing in Dallas at 7 p.m. on Sunday. We spent the night with the Adcoxes, who were so gracious to house us, and then made the final trip home the next day, arriving in Ruston at 3 p.m. We all bid our goodbyes and headed home to sleep in our own beds for the first time in a good, long while. 

Thank you so, so much for all the support you have given us for this year’s mission trip! It was such a blessing and honor to be able to serve in Ethiopia again, and it wouldn’t have been possible without everyone’s prayers and financial support. If you would like to learn more about Victory Gate or the nonprofits we went shopping at you can visit their websites below.

A Heart for Korah (Victory Gate) - https://aheartforkorah.com/

Hope for Korah - https://www.hopeforkorah.org/news/field-update/2023-impact-report-thank-you-standing-korah

Sabahar - https://sabahar.com/

Thank you so much, again! God bless you!

-The Wesley Ethiopia 2024 Mission Team